I am so sick of removing spiders from the room I am currently sitting in, this evening I already killed three. I don't know why, but in this summer we have a lot spiders here and it is freaking annoying.

Ok, fortunately I am living in an area where spiders are small and not able to poison you. I got once bitten by a spider and it really hurt, so I don't like these animals in general.

Has anyone had an encounter with a really big and dangerous spider? Of course not in the zoo but somewhere outside or inside the place you are living. Is the regular appearance of big spiders normal in some areas of this world and do the people care if they see such an "unbeautiful" and probably dangerous animal every day?

Yea get spiders in my house all the time. The reason I dont throw the lizards out side is to have them eat them maybe. I have this one type dont know the name. Not that small maybe a little smaller than a Daddy long leg and has a red middle I think. Plenty of Brown Recluses in Floirda. Also alot of Banna Spiders too.

"It was just four of us on the flight deck, trying to do our job" (Captain Al Haynes)

Well I own 4 tarantulas as pets so yes I have encountered big spiders. As for them being nasty - I don't understand the problem. Sure some spiders can bite but the dangerous ones are few and far between and they don't go out of their way to bite. Yet people are afraid of them. On the other hand dogs can cause nasty injuries with heir bites and many dogs do go out of their way to bite and yet relatively few people are afraid of them. The world is crazy IMHO!

I used to think the brain is the most fascinating part of my body. But, hey, who is telling me that?

I live at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains (they're the ones just north of Los Angeles) and you can find tarantulas around here if it's the right time of year and you know where to look. I'm happy to have them stay in the mountains, but I don't freak out about it if I see one... they're really pretty benign.

Scorpions, on the other hand, freak me out. Every time I go to Arizona I'm paranoid to take my shoes off--I think someone told me once that they sometimes crawl in people's hiking boots. Ewww.

* A jumping-spider (Or whatever it is called in English) can jump 25 times it's own bodylength.
* The nursery rhyme "Little miss muffet" is actually based on the daughter of a doctor who thought it was healthy to eat spiders.
* The combined weight of all insects eaten by spiders around the world every year is bigger than the weight of all humans on earth combined(!)
* A Spider has 48 "knees": Eight legs, with six hinges each.
* Compared to it's weight, spiders web is twice as strong as steel. The fact that it is elastic makes it the strongest and most solid material in the world. It is said that spiders web as thick as a pencil will hold a 747 in the air.
* The poison of a black widow spider is 15 times stronger than poison from a rattle snake.
* Spiders don't eat, they drink. They insert a certain type of fluid into the "victim" using their teeth, which turns the inside into liquid. (Yummy)
* Tarantulas are large spiders (Duh), normally 12cm including the legs. But the largest species can get as large as 26 cm. Large enough to cover a standard dinnerplate.

Source: Terry Nordal.

Thought I'd finish up with a few words by Vincent Price/Alice Cooper from "The Black Widow":

"You know what I think I love the most about her is her inborn need to dominate, posses.

In fact, immediately after the consummation of her marriage to the smaller and weaker male of the species she kills and eats him...

A few years a go we rented a holiday cottage in france that had recently been renovated and this had clearly disturbed some of the 8 legged residents. One night I woke up and turned on the light. On the opposite wall there was a spider that must have measured over 8" across the span of its legs. Yikes. I don't think it was dangerous (to people) but we, sorry, I, had to try and get it inside a large jug to evict it.

I owned a tarantula when I was younger. She was a sweety and very tame. They have the best pets of all creatures. You don't need to clean their cages (and in fact they don't like when you do), they don't make any noise, and they rarely eat. Feeding them monthly is very entertaining even.

As for wild spiders in the house, I don't know why people are so hung up over this. They don't harm or damage property; they don't get into your food; and aren't a disease risk. They are actually beneficial, because they kill and eat the bugs that are all of those things. They exterminate your home for you and don't even bill you for it. They are a built-in army of Orkin man. I have a rule in my house that no spiders are to even be killed. The only exception to this rule is when its necessary to maintain peace in the household. Such as when they are in my kids rooms resulting in a refusal to sleep there, or if one invades the vicinity of my wife (then its kill or be killed).

I must admit I am happy not to live in the outskirts of the Amazones, and to be honest the spiders I encounter are not to complain over. Besides, all I have to do is "escort them" out of my room. (Or smash them, even though I know it's bad luck...)

I was tromping around the bush on Townsend Island inside the Shoalwater Bay Training Area just off Australia during an exercise and was preparing the firing range by putting up IR targets for the Marines to shoot when they were scheduled to land a few days later.

We came across two trees about 5 feet apart and for some reason we all stopped. I'm glad we did because it was then we saw the web suspended between the two trees and this huge spider about the size of your clenched fist perched on the web. I have no idea what kind of spider it was but we didn't mess around with it.

I have more than enough spiders in my belgian garden and I am a genuine arachnophobic. However, the biggest one I ever saw was in 1994 on the wall of a public swimming pool in South Africa. Legspan about the size of a serving plate. I have also seen a pretty sizeable one hanging from the roof of the house I was staying in in Rio, Brazil in 1991. Both encounters left my skin crawling for weeks afterwards.

I wacthed a fear factor (tv show) when the contestants had to eat these spiders. Not sure of the type. But it was big-real big. Oh man I about freaked out watching it. I would have quit if I was on that show.

I have black widows beyond counting around my property here in the Nevada desert. A few precautions are needed when working outside or in the garage. Never see them in the house, but we spray once a month. We probably also have the fiddlebacks but I've not seen one yet. Used to see them when I lived near Miramar NAS.

Tarantulas are startling when you encounter one, that is for sure. One memorable one - I came out of the Officer's Club at a base in Panama and got in my car. When I turned on the headllights there was a tarantula on the windshield. I could not be sure if he was inside or outside! Seeing that he was outside, I rolled up the windows and drove away. He made a big thump as he bounced off my trunk lid when he finally blew off.

Happiness is not seeing another trite Ste. Maarten photo all week long.

You guys are total wooses. Try having a bloody Huntsman Spider the size of a big mans hand living in your outside rearview vision mirror on your car.

It's fabulously nice driving to work and all of a sudden seeing this huge creepy black thing crawl out of your mirror and block your view of traffic. I just put the window down and brushed the damn thing away.

Not.

Actually I screamed, stomped on the brakes, jumped out in peak hour traffic and had some delivery van driver brush the damn thing off for me.

LOL

And to think I grew up in rural QLD and had to empty the skimmer box on the pool on a regular basis of dead toads, spiders and snakes is beside the point.

You guys are total wooses. Try having a bloody Huntsman Spider the size of a big mans hand living in your outside rearview vision mirror on your car.

When I lived in Australia I had the same problem. My car had heated mirrors and that got rid of the little bugger!

One time my wife, who is Japanese and not used to spiders, came to visit me in Sydney and had an encounter with a huntsman. My neighbours came over to see who had been murdered after she let out a blood curdling scream and spent the next hour sitting on the dining table shaking.

25 L-188
: I haven't But then again, I don't have a huge desire to go to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Iraq anytime soon.

26 MHTMDW
: Ever since I read in Huckleberry Finn that it was bad luck to kill spiders, i tend to leave them alone. They do have benfits as far as killing other i